“The part about the awards and prizes is true.” I’ve just made this up; I don’t know what else to say. I can hear a hand, like a seashell, over the phone.
“She says the part about the awards and prizes is true, Nick. What part about the awards and prizes?” Miriam then gets back on the phone. “Hello, this is Miriam.”
“Hi, Miriam. Only part of the part about the prizes is true. And I was just kidding about the awards.”
“Yes,” she says. “Your father and I are planning on taking a lovely trip to Florida for Thanksgiving, aren’t we, Nick?”
“Yes, that’s true,” says Nick, my father.
“How nice,” I say.
“My son and his family are down there and they love to have grandma for holidays, you know how that is.”
“Of course.” I’m feeling lost, floating.
“Nick, do you want to say more to Donna?”
Afterward I put on a sweater and go for a walk. I try to breathe deeply and can’t. My breath won’t catch and turn over; it stops prematurely in a panic and I have to breathe shallowly, off the top of my lungs. My nose has gone numb. Though it’s sunny for November, my nose has gone cold as meat. I touch the tip and it feels not like a nose but like a strange, fleshy bump, like a cervix through a diaphragm, a distant knob. I feel a pain in my chest and in my head. I wonder if I’m having a stroke. I keep walking, thwarted and dizzy. A girl is trying to roller skate in the big chunky gravel of her driveway and can’t. She stumbles around, an image of all the impossibilities of everyone’s life, ridiculous and heartbreaking. I used to do that, skate around like that in the driveway and fall, stones sticking in the pus of my scraped knees, like something necessary.
Even walking I am disoriented. I must get outside of myself, I must extend myself, communicate with the world. I stare at a squirrel up ahead and, without thinking, call, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”
“What is this scar?” I’m tracing a long, pale train track along Darrel’s leg. “Is that from the war?”
“No. I was in a bicycle accident when I was ten. I smashed into the bumper of a car and landed on pavement and glass. I had to have fourteen stitches.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You didn’t disappoint me.”
“Of course I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. I know what it is you want me to be.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m figuring you out, Carpenter.”
I look him straight in the shoulder blade. “No you’re not,” I say. “Buster.”
When I think of my father dying, both of my parents gone, it somehow becomes important to remember my childhood and that’s when, of course, I can’t. It all becomes evaporated, like a doomed planet in a science-fiction movie. Sometimes, though, I remember bits and it’s like finding a few odd pieces of lost jewelry. I remember visiting my father at the fire station, trying on his hat; playing dress-up with my mother’s old lingerie (I sometimes modeled for my father when he was home); trying on secondhand things my cousin in Boston had outgrown, sweaters with Filene’s and Jonathan Logan tags. My mother would stand me on a chair—“Ta-da!”—and we would have a fashion show.
These are all connected with clothes, with trying to be someone else; that’s mostly what people remember — that effort to leave themselves. Although there are a few other things I remember, odd lodgers in the rooming house of my recall. I remember my paper route, my trombone lessons, summers spent squeezing open the throats of snapdragon blossoms and pretending they growled and really snapped. I remember a friend named Sarah Garrison coming over to play, fascinated that we lived in a trailer. She stayed for dinner, and when her mother came to pick her up, Mrs. Garrison came to the door with a pale, bewildered face: “Is Sarah there?” The trailer appalled her, maybe frightened her. Here, I knew, was an adult I was stronger than. I showed her my monster finger puppet. “This is a snap dragon,” I said.
And I remember playing with Louis: Flying Horses, Astronaut, Wedding. When we were flying horses we would flap our wings and whinny and gallop down the road. The neighbors worried. We would make nests in the field across from where we lived, and we would lay eggs in them and then spring up and rejoice in horse language. We would do little dances with our hooves and teach our babies how to look for worms in the ground. For Astronaut we hiked a hot mile and a half down the road to the junkyard, where we climbed, like gleeful astronauts, into the old abandoned cars, steering them, making motor noises, squealing tires, squinting out through the smashed windshields which had been splintered into stars. When we played Wedding, we would go out into the woods with gauzy curtains draped over our heads. Louis consented to this mostly because he was lonely and had nothing else to do. We were both brides. We would pronounce our ersatz vows to one another and throw our fern bouquets (made by grabbing the bottom of the fern and moving our hands slowly up the stem, denuding the entire fern). I would sing the wedding music — something I deemed romantic, a song my father had learned in the army and would sometimes sing around the house: “… She’s got a pair of hips/Just like two battleships / Hot dog, that’s where my money goes.”
But even these bits drift away from me, even now after I’ve conjured them. It’s because they don’t fit anywhere, so I can’t keep them still, can’t connect and possess them. They make only for a jagged fuzz of a past and a father getting old and eating giblets in Florida.
My life, what I’ve lived so far, crumbles across its very center and the pieces float off a slight distance and just stay there, jigsawed, glueless, and dead.
My heart is raucous as a tea kettle. I have stopped by Gerard’s with Chinese food for a quick chow-down. I eat and rant at the same time, sitting cross-legged on the floor against the couch. I pointlessly hurl throw pillows across the room. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Throwing cushion to the winds?” I curl my lip. I tell him I want to pretend. I want to pretend there’s such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
“Endurance is a country in Central America,” says Gerard. “It has nothing to do with love. As for requited, that has nothing to do with anything. Except, my dear, you and me.” He extends a long, curving arm. He kisses me. I say good night, I have to go, I have to go home and make honey milk.
Gerard walks me out to my car. It’s dark already, and the night sky is beautiful and cold. Gerard points up to it. “You see the sky?” he sings to the tune of an old Herb Alpert song. “The sky’s in love with you …”
I hold up the tail end of an egg roll. I look Gerard straight in the beard. “I am a wok,” I say, “I am an island.” Then I get in my car and drive away.
Darrel has keys, I hear the jangle and thud downstairs, and soon he has slipped into bed beside me.
“Did you say something?” he asks. He glides his hand down the side of my ribcage.
“No. Why?”
“I thought you said something.”
“No,” I say. “Did you?”
“No,” he says.
This morning I get up to correct papers and it’s still dark outside, the streetlights still on. I put some water on for coffee, then wander out into the living room. I glance out the front window, and there’s a woman in slippers and a robe standing in the middle of the street, grinning and waving at me as if she’d been standing there all night just waiting for me to look out and find her. I shut the curtains, terrified, then peek out again to see if she’s still there. She is and gives me a glorious, gregarious wave. She sees me, recognizes me, knows me — how does she know me? Oh my god. I walk to the kitchen and back. I peek out again. Only the frozen gray street — she has vanished.